Improving Healthcare with Hadoop in the Cloud

We love to hear examples from the ecosystem of how organizations are benefiting from Hadoop and today Hortonworks partner Microsoft posted a great detailed case study on how one of their partners – Ascribe – is using Microsoft’s HDInsight Service, their cloud based 100% Apache Hadoop service to transform healthcare in the UK.

Ascribe is a UK based company focused on solutions for the healthcare industry and was an early adopter of HDInsight which is built using the Hortonworks Data Platform. For this project Ascribe had big goals of not just improving the monitoring of infectious diseases but to also improve operations within healthcare providers. They planned to achieve their goals through a combination of a hybrid cloud solution built using on-premise Microsoft SQL Server 2012, HDInsight Service and BI tools available in SQL Server, and they asked Leeds Teaching Hospital to participate with them in the project.

Leeds Teaching Hospital is one of the biggest NHS trusts in the UK, and can generate up to half a million structured records each year in its Emergency Department system. The hospital also generates approximately 1 million unstructured case files each month. As part of the pilot Leeds was able to identify dozens of scenarios for improving operations and reducing costs. One example involves looking at case notes and identifying costly services such as tests that were not recorded in the clinical data base.

Exploiting new data types

Leeds looks forward to transforming its operations in several scenarios. For example, the hospital can now look at case notes and identify costly services such as tests that were not recorded in clinical databases. By using a distributed platform to aggregate and process information from disparate sources such as emergency room notes, school attendance records, and social media, Ascribe is unlocking the potential of huge volumes of data.

Enabling new analytics

With this new solution healthcare providers can use new analytic capabilities and self-service BI tools to respond faster and collaborate more easily with peers. This is a great example of the new kinds of analytic capabilities enabled by Hadoop within the healthcare industry.

Even more great examples of organizations using HDInsight can be found in a recent showcase in CIO Magazine.

You can learn more about the Leeds Teaching Hospital solution by reading the case study here.

You can learn more about Microsoft’s contributions to Apache Hadoop here.